South Korea is furious that the personal information of about 35 million of its Internet users were stolen in a hacking attack that originated in China. Normally South Korea has to worry about hack attacks from the North, but this time it does not think that “Dear Leader” has been on his computer console hacking them.

Internet and social media sites Nate and Cyworld were hit with the hackers looking for social security numbers and email addresses. According to the Korea Communications Commission the operator of the sites, SK Communications, alleged the attack originated from computers in China based on their Internet Protocol addresses.

For once it also does not seem to be a state sponsored attack either. Governments are not usually interested in the user IDs, passwords, social security numbers, names, mobile phone numbers and email addresses of the great unwashed. It is more likely Chinese criminal gangs who want to use the information for Phishing attacks.

According to NPR the attack would be the largest Internet hacking case to have taken place in South Korea.

A South Korean mother has been charged with killing her three-year-old son while she was tired from marathon internet game-playing.

The case is another where Internet games addiction has been highlighted as the cause. The 27 year old woman, identified as “Kim”, 27, played online games for about 10 hours a day.

Coppers said her house was like a rubbish site because she was a gaming addict. She beat the three-year-old and strangled him after he disturbed her by having a Nintendo on the floor.

She was cross because she was about to sleep after playing online games for four hours in the morning. The woman left the boy's body in the house for three days and her in-laws reported the death to police.

She mostly played online card games and liked raising virtual pets, the coppers said.

Boffins in South Korea have come up with a networking router which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second.

According to Technology Review the technique, developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology uses cheap commodity chips, such as those made by Intel and Nvidia, in high-performance routers, in place of custom-made hardware.

Software developed by the researchers could also serve as a testbed for novel networking protocols that might eventually replace the ancient ones currently in play. The current system means that commercial software routers from companies such as Vyatta can typically only attain transfer data at speeds of up to three gigabytes per second which makes the router a bit of a bottleneck.

Sue Moon, leader of the lab in which the research was conducted and her students Sangjin Han and Keon Jang developed software called PacketShader which they wanted to get a PC router to 10 gigabytes per second. Once they worked out the principle they were able to push it to 40.

PacketShader uses a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) to help process packets of data sent across a network.